Stranger, when you appeared there on the horizon miles to
the east, a speck silhouetted against the dawn, you stepped on
my toes and bumped into me. Did you not feel the impact?

Before you appeared this whole expanse was my body, and
the light and the colors in it my mind. Then the collision occurred. Now look at me. My body is shrunken to a midget-trunk
with four midget-limbs. And my mind is in a skull.

I felt the impact, Stranger. I bid you good-morning -- and
heartily farewell!

-- from an English sportsman's diary.

THE IDEA THAT beauty is a feeling is discredited by those whose
aesthetic experience testifies that beauty is objective, since feelings
are certainly subjective. Yet one is still disinclined to give it up.
The aery radiance of a thing of beauty is very much akin to, if not
identical with, the feeling of him whom it enthralls. That is why
it is a joy forever. To him it seems as if he consummates his emotional self in the beautiful object. He swathes it with his own feelings, and thereby lends to it a good part of its appeal.

I do not want to deny outright the hypothesis that beauty is feeling but, rather, to supplement it with an account of how, under

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